NovaMind News

In yet another significant update to the capabilities of NovaMind 5 for Mac preview release, NovaMind has enhanced the capabilities of the task reporting by adding a very powerful printing option, and exports to RTF and MS Word.

You can print your tasks directly from within the NovaMind program. When you choose to print, you will see options as follows:

NovaMind 5 Task Report Printing Options

The header and footer options are almost exactly the same as the main Mind Map printing options, so we won’t go into them in detail here. Notice one item in particular though, and that is the “Print Filter Criteria” option. If you turn this option on, the report will include the exact criteria that were used to generate the report, for example:

Task Report Filter Criteria

The information included in the reports is filtered according to your filtering criteria, and sorted according to any sorting you may have set up using the column headers.

The report only includes the columns you have chosen to include in your view, and the ordering and width is dependent on what you have set up on the task reports panel. Basically, we take the things you are looking at on the screen and reproduce that as best we can in the report. If you see columns with data that is wrapped onto two lines, and you want to prevent that, you would just cancel out of the printing, and widen the column and try again. Seeing as the task column is almost always going to be wider than any other columns, it is set to take up any available space once the other columns have taken up their space.

Task Report Exports

You can export your task data to several formats by using the popup menu in the bottom left of the task reports window:

Task Report Export Formats

CSV Export:

You can export the data from your report to CSV (comma separated values). Only the data that is shown in the results table will be exported, and only the columns that you have showing at the time. The export will also honor your sort order.

CSV files can be read by many programs, including in particular spreadsheet programs such as Microsoft Excel.

Note that the specification for CSV files is very loose, and it doesn’t even have a standardized way of representing dates, so we just export the data as it appears on your screen. Most programs that import CSV files have options for interpreting things like percentages and dates, if they need to turn them into their raw data types to work with them.

RTF and Word Export

The RTF and Word export give you a table with the information, showing the columns you have selected, and with the data sorted according to your selected sort column (if you have sorted it). It also includes all the filtering criteria, just like what you get when you print it out.